RFG 2012 Retros and Neuroscience

Convenor: Linda Rising Participants: Ilja Preuß, …

Research shows that we are sensitive to temperature in making judgements about people and events. Set up a warm meeting room to encourage positive feelings.

• Toys to keep hands busy
• Wordless communication exercises
• Do not move the talking stick, move the speakers
• Gallery walks
• Build the project using cardboard and tape
• Use pipe cleaners to fiddle around
• Go for a walk (related to “take a break”)
• Pair walk & talk
• Switch places between exercises
• Do a body exercise before starting a retro
• Provide pendulum seats or sitting balls
• Energizers
• Fidgets & fiddling gadgets
• Ice breakers
• Walking scales (= Solution-focus tool in 3D)
• Regular warm-up, activation exercises
• Do exercises where people have to move
• Move around the room. Put posters or chairs in different parts of the room. Move between them to gather data, etc.
• Walk & talk
• Constellations
• Regroup
• Let them get the material
• Active activities
• Games
• Hot chair
• Oranges on the table and difficult tea bags.
• Pantomime the problems

• Hip flask
• Pot luck with everyone bringing a dish to share
• Do retro while cooking a five-course meal
• Let people bring some food
• Cook together before, after, during the retro
• Having fruit and drink available during the retro, not just during the breaks
• Remind people to drink water
• Feed your team
• Water and nuts on the table
• Invite “nuts”

• Visual exercises
• Don’t only rely on color for meaning
• Sticky notes and colored napkins
• Use colorful pictures as metaphors
• Have colorful objects in the room
• Use color appropriate to the phase
• Some combos of color “vibrate” painfully
• Color on the flipchart
• Daylight in the room
• Colored shadows on the flipchart
• Postcard retro
• Art – drawing, painting
• Colored light
• Paint walls
• Use different colors, e.g. for good, neutral, bad lets you easily create a heatmap on the wall
• When scribing, alternate marker colors

• Animal talking stick
• Animals sometimes take over implicit roles in a meeting, watch the animal and ask what information it is telling you
• The animal of the Muppet show
• Bring your well-mannered dog to work
• Observing an animal, increases observation skills
• Pet rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters in a room
• Hexabugs – gadget animals
• Teddy bears stroking mascots
• Animals as metaphors, exercise components,
• Aquarium in the room
• Bring my stuffed octopus as a talking stick
• Animal metaphors of all kinds
• Our office dog always creates an atmosphere of relaxation and he’s allowed to join any meeting he wants to

• Have a break to walk outside
• Look out the window
• Exercise outdoors
• Go outside to have a break
• Retro in the park
• Pass a basket of fruit for smelling and eating
• Have nature inside – flowers, plants, fresh air
• Hiking retro
• Have the retro outside
• Project pictures of nature on the wall
• Build company garden houses
• Retro in the pool
• Retro in the forest
• Bring a little nature in the workplace – plants, flowers
• Use nature metaphors
• Have outside workplaces
• Daylight lamps
• Do brainstorming outside
• Retreat retros

• Portable mattress provided
• Add a 60 minutes speech after lunch
• Buy a couch for the team room
• Allow yourself to skip evening events and go to bed early (occasionally)
• Sitting still (meditating) until the bell rings
• Encourage power naps and provide space
• Yoga at the start of the retro
• Include guided visualizations

• Use gestures
• Play roles in funny voices
• Listen for and utilize clients’ metaphors skillfully
• Learn a new foreign language and from there reflect on your native tongue
• Do quiet exercises
• Process using pictures and images
• If you switch to a language that is not your native one you make more rational decisions
• Let the results be sung
• Create appropriate words

• Let longer retros/meetings span over night, e.g. afternoon + morning
• Have some minutes of absolute silence
• Change the idea of a break as something unproductive
• Everyone close your eyes and think of this.
• Quakers start every meal with silence. We could do the same for a retro.
• Add games/activities as a break.
• After 2 hours you’re kidding yourself.
• Meetings and retros with the Pomodoro technique (focus for 20 min, take a break for 5 min)
• Take a short walk
• Use the co-pilot to manage the breaks
• Have a break after each exercise
• Let fresh air into the room while having a break
• 30 change exercise, 90 min take a break
• Take the team dog out
• Pomodoro technique, divide into short segments with a 5 min break
• Moment of silence

• Timothy Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves
• Daniel Pink, A Whole New Mind, Drive, podcast
• Cordelia Fine, A Mind of its Own
• John Medina, Brain Rules
• Jonah Lehrer, How We Decide, Imagine
• James Zull, The Art of Changing the Brain
• Podcasts: brainsciencepodcast, 60-second Mind
• David Rock
• Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, book and TED talk
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, TED talk
• George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things
• Paul Zak, TED talk on oxytocin
• Antonio Damasio, Descarte’s Error